Proust Was a Neuroscientist
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.28 (836 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B001F8LJJ2 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 552 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-05-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley. Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a proc
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier identified umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language – a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to
Well written mashup between the arts and cognitive neuroscience AntDina I put Jonah in the same category as Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Speck: great points derived from insightful thinking surrounded by science and solid storytelling. This is book I'd give away to those who see the crossover from cognitive neuroscience and the arts. (Yes, artists got it right before the profs). The book moves at a comfortable pace and is full of anecdotal evidence to carry you down the river of his thinking. Readers should know Lehrer had a bit of controversy about his scientific due diligence in other works. Personally I think it's petty academic posturing. Sometimes it . RedBird said Very Interesting and Enjoyable Read. I really enjoyed the read. I know some reviewers have said things like "No, Proust was not a scientist", or "the author is just making up connections, the discoveries were made by scientists Not these artists", and so on. I think those reviewers are missing the point and taking things way too literally. I'm an artist myself so I really connected with these chapters about how these masterful artists intuitively made connections about the human mind that hadn't been discovered or at least published at the time they did so, it's an interesting concept and most people who are in to art a. A good analysis of the modern literature. The author is able to entry in the soul of Proust, Cézanne, Withman, Eliot not only for the greatness in the art and literature, but also for their visions by a psychological point of view. In those men the strongness of their art was united to a particular study of the human life. This analysis goes in the deep levels of the mind, so we can retain this context particularly important for a knowledge of the modern times. The correlations of those different aspects is interesting, so we can see the narrow relation between the work of Leherand and his teacher, Kandel.